Running and writing

Al Filreis

Joyce Carol Oates (in an interview with Grace Waltman and Jessica McCort) talks about running and imagination.

Joyce Carol Oates: Oh yes? Are you a runner?

Grace Waltman: I am a runner, and I like to be in movement.

Oates: Just like me.

Waltman: So I was really struck by your experience, when you that you were in London, but you were dreaming of Detroit, even though all the while you were actually running in Hyde Park (in London, England). I was interested in how a person can envision one geographic location, even while they’re in another one. And, so, my question is — for example, if you might be running — do you find yourself more aware of the surroundings you’re envisioning, or [of] those that are actually around you? And, how might that function in your creative process?

Oates: Well, it’s kind of a complex question because the act of running is a really a manifold. Sometimes you’re working on a problem that’s formal, and you’re looking for language, or you’re looking for a way into a text that hasn’t been written yet. Sometimes when you’re running, you’re looking for a way to edit the text that’s all finished. And so, these are kind of formal preoccupations. I find the act of running very meditative and almost trancelike. I don’t like the treadmill nearly as much as running, but I can do the treadmill if it’s really cold out. I almost go into a kind of trance, and it’s very good for figuring things out spatially — the way the text itself is like a paragraph set that maybe could be reshuffled or eliminated, and that somehow is a very different sort of activity from running and envisioning a different land — or cityscape. And, I think, probably, I don’t do that much of envisioning another landscape. I tend to be very interested in what I’m looking at and what I’m seeing, and I find landscape to have a spiritual, or psychological, or emotional value in the text, and that becomes like a character. So, my apprehension of, say, the city of Detroit, would probably not be somebody else’s. You know, I’m looking at it as a landscape or a cityscape of heightened drama in which something’s about to happen — as some of the backdrop. But we know that a landscape or a cityscape is basically an entity that has no animation in itself. You know, we’re bringing to it, or we’re projecting onto it. It’s a very interesting question. I often feel that the solution to a formal problem will be found on a run, or at the end of a run, or coming back from a run, whereas if I stayed home at my desk, then I wouldn’t get it. And sometimes when I travel — I’m getting off an airplane in a different city and walking very quickly along in an airport — I sort of feel that I’m coming to something, and sometimes I have these strange little revelations that help me with a knotty problem. And so I think, though I’m not a mystical person at all — I’m actually quite skeptical — so I think that if I had stayed home and hadn’t come to St. Louis, you know, would I have figured out about how to end the story? Because I figured something out about an hour ago, and I felt as though it was kind of waiting for me here in St. Louis. But if I’d stayed home, then maybe I wouldn’t have gotten it, maybe ever, or not so quickly.

August 24, 2009

< previous post next post >

RSS feed | subscribe by email

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.